Ahem, yes, we should—and I've already started out with a few common mistakes—which I'll get to shortly.

This is a new column, and my goal is to make you a better writer. I was bored senseless in my high school English classes, so I promise to go over subjects in an easy way that will help you improve, painlessly.

Learn how to teach and assess writing more effectively and help students understand the 6-Traits of good writing (voice, ideas, word choice, organization, sentence fluency & conventions). Explore strategies to enable learners to progress through higher standards and improve test scores. Participants get extensive hands-on practice assessing a variety of student samples using the 6-Traits rubric.

Teachers have been introducing the trait language to students in a variety of ways. Here are some of my favorite 6-Traits introduction strategies. Thanks to all of you who have sent in new pictures! If you would like to email digital photos of how you have introduced the traits into your environment, we'll post them on our website for all to see. Click on some of the photos below for a larger view of the bulletin board.

"With the help of Steve Hargadon and Chris Dawson I recently discovered a neat feature in Scribd. In Scribd you can create public collections to which any Scribd user can add documents. As the creator of the collection you can moderate the submissions before they appear in your collection. I made a short screencast on how to do this. The screencast is embedded below."

I've always taught the importance of reading a paper aloud. Every writer should do this when proofreading. Using an avatar as a part of the process makes sense. I've used VOKI, but this use never occurred to me. What do you think? ~ Dennis

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Students use text-to-speech software (Web 2.0 Avatars) to listen to their writing aloud. We use this 21st century method for proofreading when students do not read over their writing or are unaware of mistakes in their story. Students use this self-discovery strategy of revision and editing in order to privately critique their own work before conferring with the teacher.

Although the NWP has lost funding, it remains a vital educator created resource for all teachers. Support the NWP! If the decision makers will consider proof of effectiveness..here it is! ~Dennis

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NWP's latest research results demonstrate that professional development programs designed and delivered by NWP sites have a positive effect on the writing achievement of students across grade levels, schools, and contexts.

As part of the first-ever Digital Learning Day, NWP has teamed up with the Alliance for Excellent Education, the New York Times Learning Network, Figment, and Edutopia to highlight innovative, technology-rich teaching practices that make learning more personalized and engaging.

PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing.

PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM). We offer the most powerful writing tool available on the internet today.As part of the development process, we put together a team of computational linguists and subject matter experts to develop a core Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine using statistical and rules-based NLP to extract language features from essays and robustly translate that into statistical models. We hope to showcase some of our technology at a later date.

What makes us different?We’ve tried out similar websites and found them to be out of touch with most writers’ needs. We found false-positive rates as high as 50% on grammar detection. As the Hippocratic Oath encourages medical doctors to “first do no harm”, we wanted to create tools that do not muddy the waters in the process of assisting with the craft of writing. These same websites acquire hefty payments for the use of their services, while our goal has always been to provide tools that are universally accessible.

Spotlight covers the intersections of technology and education, going behind the research to show how digital media is used in and out of classrooms to expand learning.

Some of the changes with writing today, Baron says, have little to do with new technology and are more the result of our increasingly less formal society. But, digital tools do bear responsibility for “flooding the scriptorium,” a phenomenon Baron likens to the way we behave at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Essentially, the huge opportunities and options for creating text (email, tweets, blogs) cause us to write (or type) more than we ordinarily would. The result is that we are less careful with our words.

"One of the greatest difficulties for writing teachers is convincing students that writing is a recursive process. It does not come to us as money does from the Tooth Fairy. It’s simply not a one-and-done process. It takes several steps and many revisions to produce a quality piece."

The wordsmith and cultural historian debunks common myths about English, recommends the smartest writing about words, and says apostrophes are “orthographic squiggles” not worth fighting for...

Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic. He specialises in language and cultural history. The second of his four books, The Secret Life of Words, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and in 2009 he received a Somerset Maugham Award. In 2011, his latest book The Language Wars was published and he presented the BBC documentary Birth of the British Novel. Since 2009, he has been the theatre critic of the London Evening Standard

Watch Reading Rockets' exclusive video interviews with top children's book authors and illustrators. You'll discover if Chris Van Allsburg is really as spooky as his books, where Jon Scieszka gets his wacky ideas, and why Patricia Polacco's warm family tales seem so real. Browse through more than 100 interviews below >

Reading aloud works on so many levels for both reading and writing. Reading aloud is a great way to develop an understanding of Sentence Fluency. It also builds vocabulary. As I write this I'm listening to Koala Lou. A fine example for sentence fluency!

Mem Fox provides a wealth of ideas and information for teachers and parents.

Tabatha shared several centos that she had found while reading THE GREAT GATSBY. A cento is a poem created with the words of another author. You might have missed that she followed up on Saturday with this digital cento -- a poem created by editing a video of a commencement speech by Steve Jobs.

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Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.